|
|
Restoring state's wetlands rewarding but 'humbling' (complete article from source)
Source: The Capital Times, by Tim Eisele
June 20, 2007
FOND DU LAC -- Wisconsin has lost half of the wetlands that were here originally -- but fortunately there is a core of people and organizations working to restore some of what once was lost.
The Department of Natural Resources is one of those organizations, and it held a wetland habitat management training session to help train new wildlife management employees and show techniques being used to restore wetlands.
Art Kitchen, wildlife biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Private Lands Office in Madison, explained some of the thought behind restoring wetlands.
"We need to look at what the land was like historically, and then decide whether to break drainage tiles or fill in ditches depending on the hydrology, soil structure, ownership of the land and adjacent lands, and vegetation," Kitchen said.
Sites with a remnant seed bank can be restored easier than those which have been farmed intensively for 50 years and where 100 percent of the plant community needs to be brought in with seed.
One inhibitor to reestablishing native vegetation is the amount of invasive species that are established. Species such as purple loosestrife, phragmities and reed canary grass must be contained to allow native species to resprout.
"I've worked on wetland restoration in Wisconsin for about 15 years, and it is a humbling experience," Kitchen said. "In the end the landowner controls the land and they are some of our greatest natural resources."
Erin O'Brien, wetland policy and conservation specialist with the Wisconsin Wetlands Association, said Wisconsin currently has about 5.3 million acres in wetlands, which is only 50 percent of what was here originally.
"Seventy-five percent of Wisconsin's wildlife species depend on wetlands for some portion of their life cycle, and 33 percent of all state threatened and endangered plants and animals need wetlands to survive," O'Brien said. "Seventy percent of the remaining wetlands in the state are privately owned, so private land management is really important."
The public receives many benefits when wetlands are restored on private lands, including preventing flooding, soaking up run-off water, storing and slowly releasing water, trapping sediments and contaminants, recharging the groundwater and supporting bio-diversity. Wetlands also provide many recreational and aesthetic values.
However, many private landowners today are discouraged from restoring wetlands, O'Brien said, because the state installed economic barriers.
"Wisconsin implemented the Agricultural Use Value Assessment law in 1998 for very good reasons," she said. "It provided discounts in property taxes for land that was in qualified agricultural use. The intent was to preserve farmland, so that farmers wouldn't have to shoulder so much of the tax load."
Unfortunately there were unintended consequences to the program. Although land in agricultural production receives favorable tax treatment, land that is of questionable agricultural value and undergoes wetland restoration does not qualify for use value assessment.
"So if a farmer has some ag land that is too wet to grow crops on and wants to put it into the Wetland Reserve Program, or the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Partners for Fish and Wildlife program, or voluntarily restore a wetland, the farmer does not qualify for agricultural use assessment," O'Brien said. "There is a property tax disincentive to let that land revert back into wetlands."
Another example she cited is where a farmer allows his cows to get into a stream. If the land is classified as pasture, the farmer receives a tax break while contributing to erosion and degraded water quality. Meanwhile, just downstream a non-farmer's restored riparian buffer can be classified as undeveloped land and be in a higher tax category.
The end result is a change in private landowner behavior. Several DNR wildlife biologists agreed that it is more difficult today to get landowners to restore wetlands even though they would like to help restore natural resources.
O'Brien sees a need to figure out a solution, which could be to expand the definition of agricultural lands to include restored wetlands or to develop a wildlife habitat program modeled after the state's Managed Forest Law which allows woodland owners to delay their taxes until a later date, or provide some type of an income tax credit for landowners who put their land into a permanent conservation easement.
Participants went out into the field to see examples of wetland restoration projects on public lands, such as the Spirit Enterprises Glacial Habitat Restoration Area and the Oakfield Waterfowl Production Area in Fond du Lac County. Both feature restored wetlands and prairie nesting habitat, and both are today home to nesting waterfowl, upland game birds and grassland birds.
Click here for complete article from The Capital Times
|
|
